Despite his failure to prevent the demise of the grammar schools, and the general unpopularity of the notion of education for leadership in the 1950s, Eric James enjoyed considerable success and influence in one area: science education. Several initiatives of the time sought to promote the formation of an industrial, social and political elite, based on the public and grammar schools; novel only in the sense that it was to be grounded in science and technology, suitably adapted to this purpose, rather than simply in the classics. At the same time that James's general approach was in decline, a potent technocratic vision of English society visibly gained ground.

SCIENCE AND EDUCATION

The lack of interest exhibited by most public schools in science education had long been cause for reproach. The Clarendon report of 1864 complained that ‘Natural science … is practically excluded from the education of the higher classes in England.’ Indeed, it continued, ‘Education with us is, in this respect, narrower than it was three centuries ago, whilst science has prodigiously extended her empire, has explored immense tracts, divided them into provinces, introduced into them order and method, and made them accessible to all. This exclusion is, in our view, a plain defect and a great practical evil.’ While this situation existed, the claims on behalf of the public schools that they produced appropriate leaders of society were highly vulnerable. As Martin Wiener remarks, the ‘virtual absence of science of any sort from their curricula’ seemed to exemplify their ‘detachment from the modern world’.